The invention relates to a method and arrangement for detecting and analyzing the reception behavior of people in at least one reception room in dependence on messages transmitted visually, audiovisually and/or auditorily, according to the type of claims. In particular, the invention relates to the automatically and objectively verifiable detection of the advertising effectiveness of messages, activities and facilities for guiding flows of customers, as well as for detecting the intentional customer behavior in shops, shopping streets, shopping arcades, terminals, railway stations, petrol stations etc.
For detecting the effectiveness of advertising measures for products and services, sensors such as infrared sensors, CCDs and the like are used in a suitable arrangement in order to count persons on entering an advertised range and on departing from the same, as well as to detect more or less statistically how long they stay in the advertised range. If necessary, also the buying behavior of the persons in dependence on an advertising campaign, which is on or not, can be indirectly detected by detecting the actually bought goods via a registration by the electronic cash at the exit of an advertising range and a purchasing area, respectively. The results obtained can be evaluated in a computer in order to draw certain conclusions from the buying behavior of the recipients in dependence on advertising. This method, however, is not very precise in its presently practiced form since, for example, the mere presence in an advertised range does not tell anything on the attention paid to the advertising.
A precise method for detecting the perception of the visual or audiovisual messages is the so-called “eye-tracking”, which detects and registers the eye movements of one or a few person/s by means of suitable sensors provided at suitable locations. The position of the eye and of the pupil signalizes the perception of and the attention to the advertising instruments by the respective recipient. The relation between the perception of and the attention to, respectively, the advertising and the buying behavior of the recipient can be found out by a long analyzing chain in combination with interviews. This method is technologically very expensive when one considers that, inter alia, a plurality of recipients is staying in an advertising and shopping range, whereby the movements of the eyes of each recipient have to be tracked.
Furthermore, there are various methods known for selecting persons in and from video images, as well as for detecting head and shoulder formations and for detecting and storing faces. They are used for counting and identifying as well as for verifying the presence of persons. Thereby head or shoulders, among others, are generally identified and body models are associated thereto. These modeled bodies and the body coordinates resulting therefrom are, to the largest extent, virtual ones and they are not suitable for a real attention analysis and communication analysis.